Whose Blue Pencil?

The Nation last week found itself with an issue dear to its professionally liberal heart: freedom of opinion. And, as usual, it made the most of it. In its own pages, the Nation, in effect, charged that the Saturday Review of Literature was suppressing free opinion. The suppression: the S.R.L.'s refusal to print a letter, signed by 84 poets, critics and others, criticizing two articles the S.R.L. had printed last June about Poet Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Prize (TIME, Aug. 29). The Nation itself printed the letter last week, alongside an article accusing the S.R.L. of everything from "a philistine attack on modern literature" to fascism. (The S.R.L. mildly observed that it had printed about 95 letters in the Bollingen controversy, considered it closed.)

But the hand that leveled an accusing finger at the S.R.L. looked as if it held a fat blue pencil of its own. Last October, the Nation had commissioned Yale Law Professor Fred Rodell to write an article on the U.S. Supreme Court. Harold C. Field, executive editor of the Nation, told Rodell he was delighted with it. But later he said that he and Freda Kirchwey, Nation editor & publisher, wanted a few changes made, notably in Rodell's criticisms of Justice Frankfurter.

"I made some changes," said Rodell, "but I refused to delete any of my criticisms of Frankfurter . . . Field said that Miss Kirchwey's personal relation with Justice Frankfurter is such that she cannot afford to publish such criticisms of him in her magazine."

Rodell took his article to the New Republic. Last week, without a quibble, the New Republic published it as written, politely said not a word about its fellow liberal's refusal to run the piece.

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